Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England Sir Ludar A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess By Talbot Baines Reed ________________________________________________________________________ For regular readers of Reed's works this will be a surprise. Not a mention of a school or its inhabitants! Set in the late sixteenth century and couched in slightly archaic English, it narrates the adventures of an apprentice to a printer. But this young lad gets caught up in all sorts of adventures, and is especially drawn to Ludar, a young Irish rebel. There is a good deal of travelling by sea, and though this sounds convincing as Reed writes it, there is not much depth in it. In other words you do not need a deep knowledge of rigging and seamanship to follow what is happening, as you do with, for instance, the work of W.H.G. Kingston. There is a slightly dream-like feel about this book. We jump from one situation to the next without, sometimes, being sure how we got there. Try the book for yourself, and see what you think. NH. ________________________________________________________________________ SIR LUDAR A STORY OF THE DAYS OF THE GREAT QUEEN BESS BY TALBOT BAINES REED A STORY OF THE DAYS OF THE GREAT QUEEN BESS. CHAPTER ONE. HOW I SAW MY QUEEN. Every story, whether wise or foolish, grave or gay, must needs have a beginning. How it comes to pass that my story begins on a certain day in May, in the year of our Lord 1585, I can never, although I am far on in life now, properly explain. For that was not the day on which I was born. That adventure had befallen me eighteen years before, at the parson's little house in Felton Regis. Most people who write their histories have a pride in dragging their readers back to the moment when they first hallooed defiance to this wicked world; but I, since I have clean forgotten the event, must e'en confess that my story does not begin there. A like adventure chanced often at the parsonage, and, at nine years of age, I reigned king absolute over a nursery full of her Majesty's subjects who called me brother, and quailed before my nod like Helots before the crest of a Spartan. But, as I say, all that is neither here nor there in my story.